We should congratulate CCP instead of blaming them. The node held up under the massive load of at least 3800 players with hundreds of capitals trying to jump onto the grid where 400 Carriers + Supers and hundreds of Dominixes shot each other in the face.You can not blame CCP for bringing few less than a thousand subcaps onto grid and then try to jump hundreds of Dreadnoughts onto the same grid.You can not blame CCP for Dreads not loading, tbh. Good job for keeping the server (more or less) alive.

Server performance is certainly an issue but I'm affraid that you cannot just "Devote a couple of programmers to one of the several lag reduction projects" to fix it.Maybe I'm totally wrong but my guess is that CCP is already way more advanced in term of lag reduction than any other MMO company, and that their margins considering our current server technology are thin.

Or maybe CCP realized no matter how they improve performances, there will always be a side who, despites having superior capitals and supercapitals numbers, will jam the system with thousand of subcaps for no purpose.I guess some people just dont learn. Even after doing the same thing for years. Or maybe they got so used to create lag intentionally they dont know how to do otherwise.

One soluton though could be some kind of artificial fog of war that prevent players from seeing eachothers on the field, at all. Except for broadcasted targets. Fleet commanders and any person in command position could be excluded from that, to be able to see the whole battlefield just like now.This way, with way less informations to forward to each client, it should be easy to increase performances exponentially.Of course the fog of war could start to trigger by hiding ships that are far-away, further reducing the player's line of sight as the lag increase. Acting like a "third layer" of CPU usage. (The first being true CPU usage, and the second TiDi).

They dont have to "accept" it, the number is still pretty valid based on experience. It is nothing more than a mathematical calculation.Wether or not CCP actively uses this knowledge as a "tool", is another discussion.

The assumption that CFC would have won without the lag is sketchy. The number of mistakes that were made by CFC and their allies is pretty large and scales from their choice of how to load grid, to their selection of primaries once they loaded. For example several hours were spent shooting a dreadnought that was out of siege and able to receive remote reps. That dreadnought ultimately survived. I'm personally astonished that they didn't try to load system before trying to load grid. Supers were never committed, and the BL capital fleet gave up and went home without even showing up. Without lag it would have been tougher for Nipple Coalition, but declaring that they won on lag alone instead of skill, knowledge, preparation and good judgement calls is going a bit far.CCP on the other hand are definitely losers in this. The lag clearly contributed to the crushing defeat of CFC forces. You can say that CFC were stupid for using lag generating Domis instead of some alpha doctrine like Maelstroms. You can critique CFC for trying to load grid and system at the same time after the hostile force had already done so. You can point to experiences in sov warfare long ago before time dialation worked its magic. But the real point is that it shouldn't have mattered. Ideally lag should not decide the outcome of sov battles in any way shape or form.The press generated by this will be one of poopsocking horror stories. Hours of struggling with nearly nonfunctioning servers. Instead of 'I wish I was there,' people will say, 'Good god I'm glad I didn't have to do that.'

Brain in Box will only allow people to get into the node quicker. It does nothing to solve lag on the node. That's TiDi and it can only go so far.Even if CCP makes a few adjustments, again it can only go so far to supporting large battles.How do you solve lag? By creating mechanics that spread battles across several systems. The following is my idea. It still needs fleshing out, but I feel it is moving in the right direction.---------------------Instead of sov being focused at the system level, it should be focused at the constellation level. iHub-type structures should be spread out over a constellation. Systems aren't taken, but constellations are. And the iHubs have to come down across a constellation within a similar time frame.This would spread out battles across multiple systems (and hopefully multiple nodes), which would help to reduce the effects of lag and TiDi. Instead of 3000+ people in a single system, you'd have 3000 people across a constellation. Every system in a constellation would have to be mapped to different nodes, of course.The problem is too many people in single systems. You want to spread people out without implementing artificial caps. And moving sov to a constellation level would/should accomplish this.Yeah, it would take more coordination, but the large nullsec blocs are capable of that sort of organization.-------------------------------Obviously the fleshing out part would involve not incentivising the defender from just piling into a single system to protect a single constellation iHub. One idea I'm floating would be all constellation iHub strengths are based on all iHubs being active. If one iHub goes down, the strength/HP of the rest drops by some percentage (1/N+1, where N = number of systems/iHubs in the constellation). Thus, there is incentive to defend all iHubs, just as there is incentive to attack them all.Anyhow, still needs more fleshing out ... but game mechanics that encourage battles to spread across a constellation seems like the only way to ensure that large battles can happen, but that they don't happen in a single system. As battles and coalitions get larger, CCPs servers can't keep up. This gives increased longevity to the game.

The blunt assertion that if the node had held up and there had been no more than normal lag then CFC forces would have won, and not just won but have 'certainly' (I quote) inflicted at least 4 trillion isk of damage on N3/PL, is, frankly, a hilarious piece of spin.

players WILL always try to reach the limit, in every game, and this is especially TRUE with eve, since the game itself is drawing a "techy" player base, with a knowledge in computers miles above any other game.however, this is no excuse for the design flaws currently in eve, regarding the single threaded process (both client AND server side), the absence of dynamic allocation throught the nodes, the terribad server tick, the netcode wich is goddamn awefull etc....CCP should be steaming like crazy on those subject, istead of developping those deloyables no one but em cares about.....

the issue does not lie in the graphic department (even if some improvements can be done here too), but in the massive amount of calculation required server side to give an accurate result from the interactions of all the involved entity in the fights, ship, missiles and drones.if you add this to the fact that 1 system cannot be spanned on all logic core of the server's CPU, and that 1 system cannot use more than one node, the limit can indeed be reached quite easily.so CCP introduced TIDI, wich is nothing less than a managed lag, allowing the server to catch up, but this doesn't solve the issue at all, in fact it makes it even WORSE due to the game mechanics.giving more time to the CPU to do the calculation by slowing time seems an good idea, and if alone, it might, but the game mechanics counteract it, since only the "infight" system is slowed (and maybe some others, often not related), allowing for reinforcement to reach the battlefield, while without tidi, those reinforcements would not have been able to reach the battlefield in time

Is there even a good reason why ships aren't cloaked when they come through a cyno? Losing your multi-billion ship without even having a chance to turn your modules on has to be one of the suckiest experiences in EVE.

Sorry but things are not that easy. CPU power do not icnrease significanlty for over half a decade. No you wil NTO see huge increases on these number anymore.. EVER. I highly doubt CCP has the conditions and the balls to re write the whoel base of the cluster code so that multiple unit scan be used for a single system.ITs too risky.THe easiest solution is gameplay wise. MAke these battles happen spread. Simple example. Move the SOV war related structures from one side of gate to the OTHER. You attack a system from the OUTSIDE. This would cause the fleets to spread in 3 systems on the cae of HED GP ( includign HED itself)

"the issue does not lie in the graphic department (even if some improvements can be done here too), but in the massive amount of calculation required server side to give an accurate result from the interactions of all the involved entity in the fights, ship, missiles and drones."Actually the main idea behind a fog of war is that the server wouldn't have to send every client every information about the battlefield, thus reducing server load (by quite a huge proportion!). A welcome side-effect being that indeed client performances would be better.

There is no massive ammount of calculations. Eve mechanics are simple enough that a Laptop could do it for all 4 K members. Just this morning in about 30 min I made a simple ray cast collision test software that could test 2 thousand rays against 2 thousand entities collision detection in a single CPU at 20 FPS. That is something MUCH MUCH more complex than anything eve calculates and running at way higher frame count.The bottleneck is surely on overhead due to the different abstraction layers they developed. and most likely the heavy part is the transitiosn between systems. That means instatiating new entities, accessing database, updating locations, checkign new fleet bonuses applications and updatign all the related outerfaces of the cluster with so much new things.We do not even know if eve is still Python on the server side.In one thing the OP is correct, CCP code is extremely inneficient from a pure number crunching view. But there are other things that may justify that. A system like eve must be easy to keep manteinance and must be developed fast (and it was sicne eve was released in a short time).

What was the difference between Asakai and HED-GP?One was the sort of emergent gameplay we really want in EVE. Players and groups may have streamed to from everwhere in the game, but once the node was hitting critical numbers most of the meaningful kills had already been delivered. It started out at a scale below 100 total, not 4000 total.The other was an expected lag- and shitfest with a 1000 men already deployed beforehand, the critical mass that Asakai may have climaxed in, with ships behaving unruly in an unpredictable environment, that's what HED-GP started out in. It was a certainty that HED-GP would be shit, even beforehand.When it comes to "Fix lag" there seem to be three prominent schools.- Fix hardware (or software closely related to hardware performance, like threading code).- Fix software (new experience-altering ideas on how to mechanize related code, like TiDi).- Fix game design (to take the brunt of the game away from structures, timers and congregation).Personally, I am quite obviously in the third camp.That doesn't mean CCP can't improve their servers (which are only natural investments) or come up with ideas that help in large battles and may even have positive results in other settings as well (TiDi), but I am a firm believer that racing against technological advancement - while most likely positive for CCP in a sense of staying competetive on the gaming market - is a situation of perpetual loss of entertainment for the players - you will always play in lag and broken envioronmental behaviour if the steps taken always ensure that you will organise to push the envelope of server performance. Any step forward will be simply be plugged by the playerbase.There is one metric the article doesn't mention. The current war encompass upward 80.000 players - there were ONLY 5% of those crammed into HED-GP. That's worth being aware of.

Eeh be careful when saying that Asakai was emergent gameplay. It was mostly caused by a poor UI with no confirmation message. (I'm pretty sure that Eve is the only thing on the internet where there is not confirmation message for suiciding 2k$ worth of assets (= titan jumping instead of bridging)One could argue that should he have put a clone bay on his titan, and cycled it, it would have prevented him from jumping in the first place. Which is true and is why this player was imprudent. (But thank you for creating Asakai :D)

This is pretty ridiculous, in 2009 when -A- and cva clashed there was under 1k people in system and the node fried and cva died. now today 2014 CFC/RUS pile 3k people into system on top of PL/N3s 900 and you say it's ccps fault? For reals? were talking night and day here, 1k to 4k people, i'd say ccp is doing there damn job and a fine damn job, goons/Rus made a mistake and suffered the consequence, it is no ones fault but theres certainly not ccp. if u want to say ccp is to blame then how bout u ask them to reset the servers to only allow 1k player fights and we'll see how long you keep bitching. play the game, have fun, quit fucking crying that it's ccp's fault1

Lol, we can debate wether Boat's finger or a UI without a confirmation prompt was the "cause" all day :).However, I was referring to the fact that the fight emerged because "some people were doing something, and some other people decided to do something to them (drop them)", there and then.I can't remember if there may have been some minor timer in the background, but overall the target of Boat's drop was just some random ships in space. That's what EVE should be about again, finding some ships in space and interacting with them without any form of pre-advertised shitfest. That's emergent gameplay - people doing things, going about their daily routine and players interacting without being handheld.

cry babys will cry and certainly you're clearly crying, take your loss and suck it up for christ sake quit trying to shift the blame. i couldn't give 2 shits about ccp or their damage control. It is rather annoying seeing all this shit about how it's their fault that u died. right so they have set parameters for their game, you were aware of these, you pushed it past it's limit intentionally, yet somehow you still want to blame ccp. It's pitifull....

The old saying "Any publicity is good publicity" seems appropriate here. However I don't feel it would be anywhere near as bad as you are foretelling. I believe a lot of people will see this and think "How the fuck did the node not crash? How the fuck have you created a game where you can get 4000 people in the one spot willing to play simultaneously?" (Of course I realise there are a few alts in there :P).Fair enough the server couldn't handle this scenario. The work CCP has done to make this scenario possible is amazing.

the funny thing is you all say the whole time that it is the cfcs fold and not ccp. now if i remember 6vdt right there the cfc alone had 1000megas +logi+support on the station grid fighting another 1200+hostile same local size. and a cfc friend told me that they somewhen jumped in around 150 dreads on that grid and while they ofc had a few mins loading it was by far not as bad as what i hear/read now. so my question.. how can CCP NOT be the looser here?

Jump to a cyno at a safespot. Wait for ships to load grid and turn on hardeners then warp to the fight. Or they could have gone in with passive hardeners.Ultimately, the server was already showing 10% time dilation and there were a couple of thousand in system. New pilots were always going to have a tricky time loading so to do so in range of the hostile fleet was madness.

cmon stop being ccps damage control. all you do is look stupid. oh and pls go ahead with your foolish shouts like "stop crying suck your loss bla shit" honey i was not even on pc when all that happen. and then i also should join the cfc first. way to much effort to make ccps damage control happy

if they had as many caps as they claim to have then they should have jumped those in instead of the 1800 sub caps, amirite? lols way to troll though. jump the caps win the fight, or jump the sub caps then the caps and get all out slaughtered, talk shit and troll, ya'll got waisted by ur own stupidity. also u can look me up i'm un affilliated to either parties, so to assume i have any investment in tears is laughable. have fun replacing your dreads.

good ideaother solution: group ships in evey squad into 1 unit - reduces server load to 1/10 additionaly increases resistance of subcapitals to alpha strikes and drone assist without changing those mechanicsgrouped ships should have comon hitpoints pool, increased dps and tank, reduced speed and agiity so each squad woulld be equivalent of 1 dreadnaught.other solution - disable drone asist depending on tidi level (due to interference) also should work

It's CFC/Russians fault.. they new how the game works, they new the risk of bringing in 1200 people, they new they had to load everything and the enemy was already on grid and loaded.. This is the issue with CFC and the russians with out there blobs, they are nothing.. and when they themselves blob so hard it back fires in there face of course they fireworks of tears are going to happen.. CCP sucks, the server blows.. Please.. they new what was going to happen they've done it in the pass, hell they even saved a PL titan doing the same shit.. if they'd just stop and think they'd of understand dropping that many people in a system so suddenly would have crashed the server.. So, kudo's to PL good job making them look like idiots.

hey ccp damage control.. whatever they pay you.dont do drugs honey, 5 minutes you were talking shit already but we could at least understand the shit and laugh at you. but now your shit turned into a miracle of unrelated bullshit. dont do drugs you cant handle it

Filling a system with people first should not be a valid way to win anything.If you are done criticizing others, perhaps you should look at yourself and why you thought it was a good idea to spew up that incomprehensible wall of garbage.

The issue is future proofing Eve, battles will only grow exponentially, and filling a system with people first should not be a valid way to win.It's reaching a point where players are outstripping CCP. They have incredible hardware and people working on it, but we've reached an impasse where it is the game itself that restricts things like this from happening.

Interesting article. However, the "...if you Google Asakai EVE you get 57,000 results" line is kinda of silly. If you simply Google "CCP games" you'd get over 3 million results, which is something like 52 times larger in significance than Asakai. A conservative estimate on this logic would mean that CCP gets 260,000 customers based on its name alone. On the other hand, if you Google "HED-GP Eve" you get over 500,000 results.What does this all mean? Battles like Asakai and HED-GP are drama-cynos for awhile, but quickly fade into internet-oblivion (57,000 results) within a few months. The name of CCP games carries on. They'll be fine.

CCP are only human not superbeings. There is a limit to what can be done on TQ despite all the tears and media managing on display.CFC/RUS had lost the strategic objective and were looking to drop the hammer on N3/PL for once and for all. Red mist had doubtless come over many when they should have been more sensible. The server was under strain, loading grid is one of the trickier things to do in a heavy TiDi situation. Yet, they chose to jump into the fire rather than attempt to bring their fleets into the system safely and ensuring they were all prepared before engaging the enemy.It was hubris. Blaming CCP is just a way for CFC/RUS leadership to avoid the hard questions from line members.

You're right, CCP does a fantastic job of mitigating lag, they are probably the best people in the industry for dealing with it.However, things like this are CCPs fault, filling a system with people should not be considered a tactic, nor does preventing others from entering it be considered valid in the realm of a sandbox.Forget who's side you're on, if it doesn't happen to you now, it will in the future and that is the real issue.

Setting up first tends to give an advantage to have the fight on your terms. To deny this advantage exists is silly.N3/PL chose to spend time ensuring that the bulk of their forces were on grid, loaded, and ready. CFC/RUS chose to jump into the fire. Ballsy but foolish. And the price for this was paid.

The problem with that line of argument is (as someone else has already pointed out somewhere here in the commentaries) that we have ALWAYS outstripped CCP. We have not reached a point, they have always been catching up.When Mo0 rolled out in the first proper Battleship fights in EVE (the Titans of their days) the game - as every other MMO - lagged and behaved oddly at 50 on grid.When we could have 100 on grid, we had 100 on grid.When we could have 250 on grid, we had 250 on grid.When we could have 500 on grid, we had 500 on grid.When we could have 1000 on grid, we had 1000 on grid.When we can have 5000 on grid, we will have 5000 on grid...... 10% of our 50.000 man coalitions.Lag will always be shit when you opt to play in it.Server performance will always be wonky when you overload capacity.Those are realities that won't change, and we already have the buffers to sound the horns of Goondor and strain improved server performance for some time to come.

:-)Of course not. But leaving aside the questions one might raise about the author, the editors of this site have very obvious affiliations and can try to control the narrative by picking and choosing which pieces they publish. I'm morally certain that a piece claiming there was nothing wrong with the node that was not directly caused by CFC actions and slamming the tactical stupidity of the CFC command team would not have got published. Certainly not before a piece inline with the official coalition narrative - preferably by a 'neutral' - was in place.

I really like you're idea, but having read the recent posts from Grath / DBRB, wouldn't your idea favour the side with overwhelming numbers? Grath's post was saying how an entity like PL cannot compete with numbers, so they leverage ISK and skillpoints instead, so they might be able to dominate some battles across the constellation, but there's no way they could compete with the CFC forces across the whole area.

Are you high? Even PL said that this battle more a turkey shoot and utterly broken, which was even posted on this very site. You don't even need to look that far, here since you seem to have trouble finding it: http://themittani.com/news/day...

Then I suppose they need to make friends. They do have N3 as pals, who do have numbers. Nullsec has slipped into an era of coalitions. If PL wants to go it alone, then they lose. I know that's always been something PL has prided itself on, but if they want territory, then they need friends to back them up.

Of course getting your people into system first is smart, and I don't blame anyone that does it at all, I do however, blame CCP that these restrictions make it as valid a mechanic as calling primaries (there was a time when fleets didn't do this).

CCP has very good hardware and incredible people working on the issue, true.However the blame still lies with them, they created a game with sheer scope and magnitude, an infinite sandbox where fleet numbers have been growing exponentially since it's inception.If it didn't happen to one side today, it will tomorrow and blaming the other "team" doesn't fix anything.

Actually, it was me that said that CCP is always catching up :VAnyway, I agree with everything you say here, the point I am trying to make is that for CCP to continue growing their game they need to work in parallel with their players on and with Eve until the servers go dark, it is going to increase in size any way you look at it.It seems recently they're getting outpaced on a weekly basis and it is going to take something drastic to catch up, rewriting the code for instance.

Alternatively a change in mechanics to encourage spreading out or something - This is probably a bad idea but here goes; Sov mechanics 'like' we have but instead of sbus on gates, each 'system' in a constellation is 'sbu'd' and whoever wins gets the constellation.

I was a bomber pilot in a 5 squad group, we were on grid before anyone in cfc showed up (I believe) and yet when the shit hit the fan even we could hardly do anything (most of us couldn't launch bombs at all, or if they did it was so delayed they hit nothing) best part was i was hitting the launcher the entire time while slow boating towards the super fleet, ended up making laps inside the fleet trying to launch a bomb at the FBs but it wouldn't go off. I start seeing incoming damage but the first visual indicator was my ship on fire floating off. I only knew I was dead because of my locks dropping. Flew 200km in one direction before closing client :D

I suspect that CCP could solve a lot of the lag problems by capping nullsec populations at say 500 players per system-that would result in far less lag, and playable fights, whlle forcing people to commit to multiple targets at once rather than just balling up in one system and dropping drones. But that's not how people play Eve.

The fact that Elise acknowledged that the fight ended up as a turkey shoot does not mean that PL hold anyone other than the CFC FCs responsible for making it such. In fact, if you want to check what the PL command are saying, you will find it is pretty much opposed to what is said in this article. In short, stop making stuff up.

You know what? Fuck you CCP fanbois... really go fuck yourselves. This isn't a turn based game, it's not WOW and this conflict isn't something new. The fact you arse kiss CCP and their weak attempts to 'update' this game shows how much you really don't know. Ok let's vote... hands up if you want shiny planets, new jump gfx, new bubble effects, new stuff to wear or a better performing server? Lag mitigation?? Really???? It's pretty fecking obvious that this game was going to evolve in this way, and it's reaching a tipping point. If they want to keep the majority of their current play base then they HAVE to recode and improve full stop. If not then they better prepare for a landslide of lost subs when anything remotely as attractive comes long.

I blame the other "team" for whining because they should have known that:- the server was having a hard time;- attempting to load on a hostile grid was risky; and- the strategic goal was already lost.Yet they gambled, chose to engage, and are now complaining because problems that should have been anticipated and could have been mitigated were the cause of a rout. CCP can only make the systems as good as they can make them. The players know the performance of the systems and need to be realistic and plan around it.I was impressed by the performance of the node the other night. The server didn't fall despite the heavy load. I was half expecting a node crash.CCP could double the number of players a node can handle and the players would cram more bodies in. When do we blame the players for their part in this? Why do we absolve ourselves of responsibility for what we choose to do?

As opposed to ...what? ...You saying this site is biased based solely on a single post by someone not affiliated with any side?Go find a statement from someone noteworthy saying it was all the RUS / CFC's fault. I'll wait.

CFC plan was:1. Crash node with domis and dreads.2. Wait till node is back up3. Jump in supers and titans to slaughter scattererd PL/N3 wrecking ball.I think you have leak and owner of game didnt like your idea of GG

I didn't lost no dread, I don't give two fucks...but saying "dont bring so many ppl" is retarded tactic, if you gonna risk your assests, you will try to bring as many ppl as you can to ensure you wont lose it...also patting CCP on their back for GREAT job is ridiculous seeing as prior to battle, G-0 and HED ewre on same node.

Personally, I've never liked arguments that pick individual cases, but okay.Again, you're right, these considerations should of been taken into account and they lost because of it, and rightly so.I don't care for white knighting either side anymore so taking that out of the discussion:This incident is one of a dozen in this war where the server has not been able to cope with what it's players throw at it. This fight in particular has been the prime example in this war, hence the news and 'debate' (some debate, some drooling slurs) surrounding it.The games performance and player expectations it should forever be evolving, and being iterated on, CCP is falling behind.

Multi-thread everything. Its going to be painful but it needs to be done. Most of the CPU improvements these days are coming in no of cores not clock speed / execution efficiency, so CCP can't rely on upgrading their servers every year or two unless they can take advantage of multi-threading (or multi-processing).It would also be very useful if CCP could live-migrate nodes without having to boot everybody. This would allow more responsive spreading of load.A useful benchmark that gets stressed each Sunday could be the number of players in Jita. CCP have said that this is automatically tuned to keep TiDi at certain levels. I want to see 2500 players there in the summer expansion, 3000 at the end of the year, and for the number to keep rising.The single-shard nature of eve is one of the most fantastic features as it makes a world-wide community that can all interact with each other. The side-effects are unfortunate, but that just means CCP need to work harder at their core technology.

ccp has 2 maybe 3 people working on the issue it's a very low priority for them when compared to expansions and providing more content for all the high sec pubbies. See year on lag in 2012 nothing heard since.

This isn't DC at all. It actually is hubris to try what CFC/RUS did. We all know that one of two things would probably happen. One was what we saw and the other would have been the node crashing. Just answer why CFC/RUS thought it was a good idea to drop that many more ships on an overloaded grid?

Indeed, the change in mechanics is probably the best route toward a non-defeatist future.Since I've already thrown out random approximants here - another interesting bit of statistics worth keeping in mind is this:While this 4000-man fight took place in one system, for a large portion of a day...How many other fights took place 50% the size of this? 25% the size of this? 10% the size of this?You'd likely be hard pressed to find a sufficient number of fights that day that even managed to break 1% the size of HED-GP.It's not an example worth calculating anything upon for a deeper understanding, but it's one of those things you need to be aware of to understand the scope, extent and practical realities of EVE in 2014.4000 players (1000 vs. 3000, only that 1:3 say alot about the present game-mechanics) fought in HED-GP alone. The rest of the entirety of the game had trouble breaking 40. Outside of N3PL and CFCRUS a 40-man fight would be considered quite substantial and newsworthy for that subset of the sandbox - at least if it involved some reasonably risky ships and tactics.That's the reality of ludicrous scale.

As a counterpoint, the battle of 6vdt (4k people) saw the CFC cyno in 95 dreads in just such a fashion: on grid. And the dreads went through a half hour warp tunnel but actually loaded on the other side. The lag was bad but it was manageable. Now in HED there were 2.6k in local when 500-600 dreads tried to cyno in, and it was assumed that the result would be similar.The RUS+CFC was wrong, but does this not indicate something about drone-based ships? Who can say that it was entirely the dominixes that contributed to the lag, when the 350+ carriers are launching 10 drones each and carrying upwards of 500 apiece? And what of the supers, which always seem to bring a giant doom cloud of lag at their deployment in numbers? The CFC has been trying to push the idea that drone boats are stupid for a plethora of reasons: they take the coordination of a fleet out of the fleet, they cause a giant pile of lag, and drone mods are far better than their turret equivalents. The latter will be fixed, but we still arrive at drone assist and lag.There is something that causes massive lag with drone boats, just like missiles before them. It needs to be fixed. And to the argument that system should have been loaded first: dictor bubbles is all I have to say about that. N3 is just trolling the RUS+CFC into trying that tactic because its a hell of a lot worse in practice.

But that's the problem. I respect that *you* would accept one or two 'expansions'. I would not. Its been seen in the past that the player base gets restless with the lack of good quality expansions. As this post exactly about size of paying players, that's an important thing to recognise. Do 'brand new players' care about big fleets being ti-died? probably not. Do old players rage-quit over tidi? Maybe. If both fixes where possible, would that lead to more subscribers? yes. Which is worse situation to be in?

Funny that.In 0.0 people only speak up when something goes wrong and it is all the people who havn't or don't want to experience it get exposed to, which is a real shame.Ironically 0.0 is very fun... when it works.The people, stories and real life history being made really can't compare to any other game.So I suggest you try it for yourself, but a real try, it takes getting used to and truely shines when you play with a group. Insert yourself into the meta game, the politiking and the wars.But in the end that's up to you to spend your leisure time however you want.

The sad fact is even a super large battle like this is only involving like 10% of the concurrent user base. Granted null sec dweller tend to be a very out spoken bunch of players but still CCP's bread and butter are those up there in high sec playing the game. Yes there are many high sec alts in high sec as well but those aren't engaged in null battles directly either.In a sense those carebears are our bread and butter as well since they are providing a good portion of the stuff we blow up down here.So yeah the lag issue is actually getting a proportionate amount of devs on it.

So, one possible solution would be to make the grid smaller? That would reduce the data sent between the server and the EVE client? Fog of war in the battlefield so to speak?To be consistent with the term TIDI which got it's namn from a phenomena in special relativity theory where time passes differently due to gravitational or relative speed causes, maybe they should call such a mechanism LOCO - from the LOrentz-Fitzgerald COntraction also found in Einsteins special relativity theories. ;-)

It would seem popular opinion isn't behind you on this one as the posts that are congratulating CCP rather than berating them are receiving higher upvotes.Your post is quite self severing at it's best. It may be that you should start removing yourself from the equation, it will give you a better overview of what's best for the community not just yourself or a small fraction of players. This is the gargantuan task that CCP and for that matter any company involved in a game that has a community has to overcome day in and day out.Comments like yours are neither helpful, warranted, or even wanted.

There was no fight. No record was broken. Most of the previous "records" weren't fights either. They were soul crushing laggy nightmares everyone hated. Meet you back here in a year so you can tell me it's not like this and things are improving again?The language the game is written in is inherently flawed, a bad choice from the start. It's been at the limit of what can be processed at a time for years, with just a series of band aids - server reinforcement, TiDi, "need for speed". They can not improve it and we see this played out over and over. Meanwhile they basically break trades descriptions by selling a product with the false advertising they gin up from such player led catastrophes by just covering up what a failure it was.

I laugh as the cfc and rus are crying about how the "lag" caused them to lose the battle. When the cfc and rus groups have been known to cause the same lag outs so the could win most of their fights. For what I can see these groups are just upset that they got beat at their own game, and because of it they want to cry and get ccp to replace their ships because they made a poor desicion and lost a fight. Man up gf and leave it alone.

So my question is WHEN are the CFC going to admit that THEIR doctrine of choice the DOMI fleet adding 5000 extra sentrys to the field is one of the MAJOR factors in causing the server to melt down to the old days of black screen performance. Mittani sort your doctrines out ffs the server can't handle it.

I was on grid in a Nyx, had a character logged in in our staging system with a slowcat and a dread (kept in reserve, as the node was already heavily strained), as well as a miner and a missionrunner in empire. I'm sure I wasn't the only one with multiple chars/accounts active but not all in HED.So, going by your math and my numbers, 40% of the concurrent userbase was active in HED.See how this works?

Hush, you are an N3 player. You should be maintaining that "the server is fine. CFC should have extracted all of their subcaps, told everyone with low SP to fuck off, and then waited to see if the servers would stabilize, then jumped in their dreads and had an ~elite honor~ brawl"

Your knowledge of basic game mechanics and drone mechanics in particular make me walk away in disgust.PROTIP: There are actually people in this game who control their drones individually. Not everyone partakes in blob warfare.

Given that spawning a new pilot in system puts large demands on the server, would it not be far to say that the difference was cynoing in less than one hundred compared with dropping multiple dread fleets?

Im all for smaller battles but locking a system due to numbers alone would make it possible for one side to get there first and "lock" the system allowing them to do whatever they wanted without interference

Yeah, okay, so the CFC should drop Domis.. we'll drop them around the same time N3PL drops Ishtars, Domis, and Archons.How about CCP unfuck sentries and remove drone assist instead?No one in Eve actually *likes* flying drone assist doctrines. However, they're the only way to win so that's what everyone does.

Ya see that's my problem because CCP get's like Two Step is saying, a lot of press about the big battles that happen in null sec. They get more subscribers and I know that's not where the money's at but let's talking abt press here for a second. A new player comes into the game wanting to be part of this amazing experience of thousands of ships blowing the crap out of each other. Then he finds himself after many months of skill training in a position where he's ready to jump into one and what does he see? 3-4 hours of warp tunnel followed by his guns cycling once every 30 mins - 1 hour. My point is either make the hard decision and re-write the code or DO NOT advertise what you can't provide. CCP should be congratulated that the server didn't die but was it an enjoyable gaming experience? NO. Either change game play so that like 2000 is the max and interfere with the sandbox or re-write the code or change the meta of null sec sov warfare.For only 2-3 ppl to work on something that brings in players is a real shame.Also the 2 ideas "Brain in a box" and Dispatcher haven't been heard from since https://www.youtube.com/watch?...There was no winner in this fight only those that new how to make the server work to their advantage.

Lol. Okokok. So when u blobb us and slaughter us you say get more friends. So we did. We were all there before you and u lost. And yes. Hats off to ccp for keeping the node alive. And btw i jumped in AFTER the cfc and rus dreads. Tool almost 2 hrs to load grid. Another half to even get my drone window. And another twenty to lock and launch drones. Why btw i didnt assign them either. Ive been playing since 08. And what server was able to handle (although with tidi) was way better then just a few years ago.

Until there are gameplay mechanics (and no just hardware limits) that impose crushing diminishing returns or even detriments against fielding more pilots, the big coalitions will simply max out any new hardware upgrades with even more numbers. As much as the line members may hate the 1% tidifests that pass for climactic battles these days, null leadership care about winning fights more than they do about reducing lag. And realistically we can't expect them to change their behavior on their own. Any change has to be forced upon them by the environment.

Eve has a ton of ancient code. I remember somewhere it said theres mass of code ccp doesnt even know what it does cause the ones that wrote it arent at ccp anymore. Tbh i think eve needs a complete recodeing. Start over eliminating the mass of useless out of date coding. Im probably wrong but when i had a commodore 64 it had a manual on making a ball bounce across the screen. I typed til my fingers hurt. Now in a few lines of typing you can make that same ball.

No ur one of the rus/cfc side arent ya. Sorry boys ur old way of thinking isnt working. You usedur superior numbers to crush anyone. Now that weve adapted all of a sudden you want to change mechanics again?

First of all ccp are right in advertising the big null sec fights. Currently NO OTHER game remotely compares to the large fights in eve. So yes id capitalize on that too. And again every year they get bigger. It will always be oh server can handle two thousand more then last year? Lets cram 4000 more in then.

Yes, the technology exists to easily handle this and much more.The more important question would be, could the advantages of such an architecture justify the rather significant costs it would incur. Demonstrating enough tangible value for this sort of implementation, both from a hardware and software rewrite perspective, may be very difficult. It is hard to judge without more data and analysis, both financial and technical.

So the options are swallow a meta game explanation to why we cannot cram more than 5000 players on 1 grid or hope for a miracle this summer, fall winter, whenever.Maybe the community should express through the CSM and forums that We don't want 10 reasonable things. We want 1. Update the engine and stop slapping paint on a chevette.Who'd be willing to give up a year of "updates" for a full "upgrade"?Anyone?

Right. Lorewise we know that a large number of ships arriving at the same time creates heavy distortions of the time-space continuum and therefore lasting disturbances in some parts of "the grid". Don't jump in like that, it will get you killed ;.)

For reference this is what I would have done.#1 Grid Fu until some part of the grid is 600KM off the PL blob.#2 Cyno'd in and warped dreadnoughts to this grid load.#3 Wait however many hours it takes for them to report they had loaded grid.#4 Suicide a small number of dreadnoughts or another 50 Dominix to blow up mobile warp disuptors until there was an appropriate warp in for the dread fleet.#5 Warp the dread fleet in. Try to use geometry so they don't end up in bubbles and can run when out of siege if neccesary.#6 During all this time use my crushing subcap superiority to prevent the enemy from leaving.#7 ????#8 Profit ????

Yes, but if game mechanics forced a single objective to be spread across multiple systems then filling up 1 system with 2000 dudes would leave you vulnerable in the other systems.If CCP were clever enough they could also scale it according to the number of people in the objective system. Once the number of people in system goes over 'x' then a new requirement would go up saying that you also need to take/hold a beacon 3 systems away. etcIf the number of people then goes over 'y' a new beacon would spawn and that would have to be held also, otherwise nothing in the objective system would be vulnerable.

Yes, actually. You might have done more than trade hundreds of dreads for a few capitals.The fact that you still cannot accept that the CFC messed up is telling. Messed up by letting N3/PL form up early uncontested. Messed up by not taking the DPS race on the SBU seriously (could have suicided a few dreads to blap around the SBU while others took it down -- would have won the strategic objective). Messed up by thinking you could spawn hundreds of pilots on a heavily stressed node without loading issues.I dearly hope the CFC capital commanders have more sense than you. If all your took from that fight was "Blame CCP" then you have learnt *nothing*.

No matter how far CCP go in making ever larger battles. The players will simply make bigger and bigger coalitions in order to win and thus the spiral is never ending.Rather than constantly seeking to increase the size of fights they should do more work on trying to limit the ability for so many people to be there in the first place.

The load on the node on jumping in is much higher than simply staying on grid. So You cant compare those two situations purely based on what the local was at, it doesnt work like that! Jumping in 95 ships vs 700 ships is a huge difference when you are in 10% tidi.

Asakai was very different due to the accessibility to the fight.It was somewhere that most of eve could get to fast and get into alive.Trying to compare these null blobs between closed groups to that fight where everyone who could get there came from all parts of eve - is a big stretch.

It's doesn't matter what CCP does, someone will ALWAYS cram more into the system to stress the node, it's been that way for years. And then someone or a certain entity will ALWAYS complain about it, making callous threads on forums, cry to the media and or threaten to desub their (alt) accounts, only to come back a couple months later and do it all over again.

CCP has done an amazing job in the last few years in terms of lag and player capability. The fact that the node survived the fight is a testament to that. 4 years ago (almost to the day actually) in the battle of d-g, there were no sentries, there was just 1500 in local and at that point no one loaded. Today we see 10000 sentries and nearly 4000 people, the vast majority of whom did load. eve has truly come a long way, and anyone who doesn't understand this is well...stupid to begin with.cfc made a number of tactical mistakes and now they look to blame someone else for them, this is only natural. "But they promised us that we can pile 10k dudes into system and have no lag." Yea sure they did, they can only promise you what they have experienced in the past. The only other 4k fight I can recall is 6vdt, no other fight has seen 4k people, not to mention 10k drones...6vdt didn't have 1000 dominixes on grid.Real blame lies with the people who made the call...at the end of the day to quote my good friend progod..."You will be fighting for useless FCs against impossible odds and without a plan." In this you did have a plan...it was N+1...or in this particular case N+3000 or so. YOU...that's right not CCP and not N3, but YOU are responsible for the system behaving how it did. Perhaps next time you will realize that quantity doesn't always win over quality. Then again it will be a long time before anyone will wipe out another capital fleet for you.

putting a limits on a system, such as mass of ships or something similar, would change the game design of system domination probably in a good way as it still would be better than these massive tiDI feasts, that really are not fun at all to anyone except maybe the master strategists of these battles (I.e. Only a handful of players).The ultimate goal of CCP could be to regularly increase these limits per system as technology and coding improves, with the stated goal of reaching open ended numbers at some point. But selling open endedness of large fleet today is just bullshit marketing. At that time, encouraging people to join Eve for massive battles is a recipe for failure and losing players that will never come back, I agree with the OP on that.I love. Eve, albeit I do my best to avoid these massive crappy game experience that are Fleet battles under heavy tiDI.If players are informed of the limits in advance, the strategies can be adjusted. If most of a fleet is in a few systems to lock them in, they can't defend other systems, or attack new areas without risking their lock..

Hahahahahahahaah. HED-GP. The gift that keeps on giving. Keep trying to shift blame, it's adorable. No server/game on the planet could have handled what you people tried to do there. Stop trying to play the game you think Eve should be and play the one you actually have, you may find the results are staggering.

What is this submission all about then?Appears to be someone thinking like this :"Better post negatively about it and then look genuinely surprised and annoyed when someone pokes fun at me"The EVE Community is laughing at you knuckle heads. Carry on with the Comedy.Lessons of History seem to be beyond you. There's many YEARS of these posts and epic failures already documented. Please add this entire catastrophe to the pile and move along.To moan about it (Jumping into a very full system with hostiles all set up) shows lack of Wisdom and Intelligence. Two important traits in EVE. To continue to do this over and over again is a sign of insanity.The fact you keep leaving systems you want to take and trying to sneak back in later on when some timer ticks over is the problem. If you were ALWAYS in the system and NEVER LEFT IT, you would not be crying here. Boo Hoo.I am not a fan of reinforce timers. I'm not a fan of monsterous hitpoint beasts you have to cut away at with great numbers. It's SPACE WOW LEVEL 9 BOSS chaff.Don't moan that you can't pig pile your entire fleet of guys into the system. Moan that you eve need these people to achieve a goal.Would love to read your wise remarks as to why your way is the best way, but I'll be very busy this week :-/

I love it how no one is talking about the main reason they lost that shitty system, losing all poses and jammers in the system without anyone noticing, in their staging system. Yes it is definitely CCP's fault.

Ultimately the fight came down to which side took more account of probable server performance. I think the N3 FC's made the right calls as best they could anticipating the server issues and adjusting their tactics accordingly. ie keeping subcaps to a minimum, being on grid first, having carriers manually activate drones rather than have them assigned etc etc. The best example of this is the use of doomsdays as a primary weapon. Those of us who remember old skool lag also remember slow cycling high impact weapons work much more effectively than fast cycling weapons in that environment. This is why artybaddons were a thing. The doomsday is this simply take to its extreme conclusion. This is why the old skool lag had least effect on the titans doomsday-fest. From what I gather the RUS/CFC side used tactics which would have been sound on a MUCH smaller scale, however abjectly refused to make allowances for the server load. The fact is we all knew server performance was going to be very poor but only one side used that likelihood as a primary influence on their strategic decision making. I can speak from the N3 side that many caps and titans were in fact held in reserve until the system began to clear upon RUS/CFC withdrawal so as not to overload the node yet further. Things became much more playable once the system was down to 2500 or so which indicates that the withdrawal of the domifleet prior to the deployment of the RUS/CFC dreads would likely have brought about a more favourable outcome from their point. I do believe that even with the domi withdrawal there would still have been enough server load to keep things stacked against the incoming dreads, however it would have been much less pronounced and it's likely that while the result of the fight would be the same it would not be so hugely one sided.My two cents anyway

That's because nobody's talking about why -A- lost the system, they're taking about why the fight went the way it did. Given that in the 3rd fleet, we only warped off the SV5 gate after the IHUB went down, I don't think the loss of the system was ever really in doubt.

Seriously, when you find yourself in a situation where you have obviously zero experience and knowledge about the subject under discussion, does it ever cross your mind even for one second that you should maybe, you know, just shut your god damn mouth and stop spouting bullshit about things that you have no idea what the fuck you are talking about? Just a suggestion...

"Give it a year or at max two and we will see the hardware begin to be developed to the levels required for this game."No, we really won't. The hardware is about as good as it's ever going to get, in terms of single-core performance.

Are you dumb? Or trained to look like one? I CODED THAT In half an hour , so to keep 20 frames per second. And was not even that. awas a ray cast system that woudl simmulate what woudl be neede d to eve have collision detection on the SHOTS. so that one ship could cover the other (somethign ccp claim to be impossible with current technology but anyone that tried know its pretty doable (specially since weapon groupings)

Excluding the fact athat basically everythign you use in your life is made by those nerds and that majority of the economic growth aroudn the world come from these nerds. You shoudl be more grateful to them ...

Google for CCP Warlock. She has a PhD from MIT in distributed systems engineering. CCP hired her in 2009. In 2011 she was forced out because she looked at the problem and CCP didn't like what she discovered.There is no good solution any time soon coming from hardware advancement. A complete re-design for the server-side code is needed. CCP will not invest the money needed to do that. So they forced her out because they didn't want her to spread the information around that there is no techical solution on the horizon for the problem of 5,000 vs 5,000 clients all running on the same server.

TL DR - CFC got dunked and now they cry for mommaAlso, stop crying about increased server capabilities. It cant be done. CCP will increase to 10 000 people on grid you will cry "why cant we have 20 000", they will increase to 20 000 on grid you will cry "why can't we have 30 000" (see where I'm going with this?)Truth is CFC lost because their own hubris. All this fame has gone to their heads...

You misunderstand me.Those that do it, do it because it maximizes their chance at victory, I have no problem with this, since it is players playing the cards dealt them.My issue lies in the fact that this card is in the deck in the first place.

What they need is some kind of floating ram and general CPU power so when a battle like this happens they can devote all of the floating ram to that one node they could easily take that power from an unsed system or system that no one is in. Just an interesting idea

I think you rather conveniently forget that CCP has had over 10 years+ experience with running this kind of universe. I'm pretty sure they don't make people lag out because they enjoy seeing their customers frustrated.Even with the capped rooms, Star Citizen, which has 0 experience with the actual running of a universe like that, is not claiming it will be able to accommodate a small fleet fight, as it is considered on EVE Online. Star Citizen has extremely detailed graphics for every ship and pilot and I'm really wondering how they are going to go about running a decent-sized fleet with that kind of load on their server.Is Star Citizen even going to allow 650 people in a single 'room'?People are incredibly hard on CCP. There are clearly challenges on the technology side of the equation but to make it seem like they couldn't be bothered about, that is really not the vibe that I get when talking to these people. It is doing them a grievous injustice.

the difference between bringing new content and updating infrastructure is that the content will be obsolete within a year or so anyway, whereas the infrastructure overhaul will save time and frustration for the next decade or so. and if left undone too long, an outdated backend is just the thing to bring the whole game down once some serious competition emerges. i'm far from a star citizen fanboi, but i simply cannot imagine the next few years going by without serious and *modern* competition for eve.

CT Scanners generate an image. Eve Online doesn't generate anything on the fly, it has to access RAM constantly. It would be very easy to store a CT scan's repetitive operations in CPU cache. Where Eve Online worse with data-sets that have to be offloaded/on-loaded constantly. Your argument would hold if CT scanners weren't specialized hardware that don't compare to standard computers. They have hardware level optimizations.So what are you going to lie about now? First you compare ray-casting something less memory intensive to eve online. Then you try and throw something on the scale of CT Scanners and how they use SO MUCH MEMORY to produce an image.I think you fail to realize that for optimizations to occur it matters where the data is physically in the computer. If the data is small enough to fit in the CPU cache yes you can process 14GB of data for output ot RAM. But if you have 14GB of data located in RAM that needs to be processed each cycle it will take ages because latency.Yes Eve Online is un-optimized. Yes it can do better. But ALL software can do better. I think your just mad you lost a capital ship you couldn't afford.

The only thing EVE's performance problems have to do with hardware is that CCP made the decision use stackless python (single threaded. Not going to ever be multithreaded) as the base for EVE and CPU architecture has moved from faster single cores to multiple cores. This isn't going to change and unless they rewrite EVE the best they can do is apply bandaids like Tidi. You almost couldn't have made a more untrue statement.

(Editor's Note: This submission is from Two Step, wormhole resident and veteran player representative from CSM6 and CSM7. He is not affiliated with any of the nullsec blocs involved in the HED-GP fight.)

The killboards are still tallying the losses, but it sounds like the fight in HED-GP Saturday will end up with a total ISK loss of at least a trillion ISK. I’m sure somewhere there is a headline about EVE players losing over $30,000 worth of ships, but I also expect the article to be full of how technical problems prevented one side from even being able to shoot back. EVE players might consider the CFC and Russian forces to be the losers in HED, but the real losers are CCP.

If you google “Asakai eve”, you get some 57,000 results. There are pages upon pages of articles from just about every video game news source, plus a bunch of coverage in more mainstream media. I don’t know CCP’s exact numbers, but even from conversations I have had, a large number of players started playing EVE because of that coverage. A conservative estimate would be that CCP gained at least 5,000 long term subscribers, and probably more than $200,000 USD in revenue, not to mention all that free advertising which just helps build the image of EVE even among those that don’t play. This is especially important now that CCP is trying to branch out into multiple games. Perhaps some of those people might be convinced to try DUST or EVE: Valkyrie once it is released. I’d estimate all that free press was probably worth at least another $200,000 USD.

If the story of HED-GP had unfolded without so many technical issues, even Elise Randoph, one of PL’s main FCs, admitted that the PL/N3 fleet would be in trouble. Perhaps CFC/RUS would still have lost a trillion ISK worth of dreads and Domis, but PL/N3 had a whole lot more on the field that might have been lost. A conservative estimate would be that they had 10 trillion ISK worth of ships on the field (according to Elise’s numbers above). Surely some of them would have escaped, but certainly enough would have died to push total losses over 5 trillion ISK, or $150,000 USD. That is over five times the losses at Asakai, and one can easily imagine the headlines: “EVE players lose enough ships to pay for an average house in the US”, “Massive 4,000 player battle results in $150K of losses”, and more.

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Hopefully CCP takes this opportunity to realize that fleet fights the size of Asakai or HED-GP are critical to their bottom line. Devoting a couple of programmers to one of the several lag reduction projects they have been toying with, such as Brain in a Box, or live remapping nodes. They already know the numbers for what Asakai brought them in revenue, a fight 5 times larger would only have brought them more subscribers and good PR. Especially in this day of twitch.tv streaming, one could only imagine how many people would have been tuning in if ships were actually blowing up, instead of a slow motion 2 frames per second lag fest. It does sound like the CSM is doing their jobs and communicating the importance of performance in the sort of large fleet fights that we seem to be getting more and more of these days. Hopefully this summer’s expansion will bring improved performance so the next huge fight will be a lot more like Asakai and less like HED-GP.